Cannot But Keep the Form
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. In the midst of the stifling life his mother and father seem to feel is good for him, Draco finds a way to keep his sanity. COMPLETE.


**Title: **Cannot But Keep the Form

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Warnings: **Sex, surrealism, angst.

**Rating: **R

**Wordcount:**2400

**Summary: **In the midst of the stifling life that his mother and father seem to feel is good for him, Draco finds a way to keep his sanity.

**Author's Note: **The title comes from a line in Yeats's poem "Memory": "Because the mountain grass/ Cannot but keep the form/ Where the mountain hare has lain."

**Cannot But Keep the Form**

Draco opened the door of the Manor and stepped out, closing it behind him. A thick cluster of stars stared down from above him, and he felt a faint breeze on his face. Somewhere in the distance was thunder.

Draco scowled. He had hoped coming outside would relieve the pressure that gripped him, ease the walls. But he seemed only to have traded one kind of confinement for another. He raised a hand as if he could bat off the sticky air, and tried to think of the thunderstorm. When it came, it would cool the gardens.

But by then, someone would have noticed he was gone, and he would have to be back in the firelit room where his parents sat and smiled on one couch, and Mrs. Grandview and her daughter sat and smiled on the other, and everyone pretended they were there for anything but what they were there for.

Draco turned his head and stared across the garden at the small dark alcove created by a place where hawthorn hedges met. His hands itched. He turned back towards the house and swallowed.

He could go there. No one in the house would notice any time passing. In fact, refreshed and relaxed, Draco could return to them much faster than he would if he had to spend a lot of time walking in the gardens and seeking a way out of both the summer evening and his future.

But he had promised himself he wouldn't use it again. He still didn't _understand _what was happening, after all. He had no idea what kind of magic made it happen, made it real, if only temporarily real. What would happen if he walked into the alcove someday and didn't come back?

_I would be happier._

For now, though, Draco chose to believe and act as he always did, that this-gateway-he went through would bring him back to the place he had come from, and probably before he was ready to leave. He walked quickly across the garden, head half-turned so he could watch the windows. No one human spied on him from them, and Draco had commanded the house-elves never to watch him in the gardens. His parents were unlikely to notice the existence of that order, and if they asked Mimi or any of the rest of them, they could truthfully reply that they'd seen nothing.

The entrance to the hedges shone before him, granted light by nothing but his own memory and perhaps a faint touch of the stars. Draco swallowed and stepped past the end of the hedge, making sure he edged sideways so that he could avoid the wicked thorns.

"Draco."

And in an instant, it was all different. The warmth around him lay lightly on his skin, like silk woven of sunlight. It was hours earlier, or looked that way, the sun lingering down the sky into the clouds that would swallow it. Long beams of golden radiance stretched across the gardens, and made the grass and the hedges glow as if made of carpet. The hawthorn blossoms were out, and were so brilliant a white that Draco reached out to touch them before he thought about it, although only petals and not pearls bent under his fingers.

And in the middle of it all, on a bench beside a dark blue hyaline pool, lay Harry, smiling up at him.

Draco went to him, and knelt down beside him, burying his face in Harry's neck. His skin was darker than the hawthorn, paler than the grass, warmer than the sun. Draco rested one hand on his chest and listened to the thump of his heart, all the more audible-or so it seemed to him-because Harry wore no shirt, only a dark green pair of trousers with golden buttons. Draco had no idea if that was the kind of thing that the real Potter wore in his real day-to-day life, and he didn't care.

He felt the heartbeat, and then Harry laughed quietly and moved to cover Draco's hand with his. Draco looked up and at those eyes that were greener than the hedges. Everything was always so _bright _here, but those eyes were the brightest of all.

"Again?" Harry asked, raising his eyebrows. "Really? I thought you only went back inside the house a minute ago."

"You _would _think that, the way you fall asleep in the sunlight," Draco snapped back, and stood to shuck off his clothes. Harry sat up to help him, and Draco bowed his head at the touch of those fingers on his chest. Harry laughed, a humming noise that seemed to coil into and weaken Draco's muscles.

"Who knew that to get you to do what I wanted, I just had to touch you _here_?" Harry asked, and traced around the center of Draco's chest in a widening spiral, heading for his heart and his nipples.

Draco leaned his head back and then sank down in the grass, Harry clambering off the bench and onto his lap. Strong, capable hands, with a scar on the heel of one that he had told Draco came from blocking a Death Eater's wand, had him half-naked in moments, and then Harry pushed him to the grass, rolled on top of him, and pressed his own summer-warmed chest to Draco's.

Draco groaned, a sound that he thought might have started around his toes, and reached up to catch Harry's shoulders, kissing him fiercely. His mouth was soft and humid, and Draco arched closer and closer, pressing in until teeth clicked and Harry laughed.

"One would think that you only wanted to kiss for the rest of your life, and _didn't _want this," he said, and pulled his trousers off so suddenly that Draco didn't even have time to mourn the loss of contact, because suddenly Harry was back, and there was a long, solid length sliding across the fabric that still covered Draco's groin. "Can you wait? Or do you want it now?"

Draco didn't have words. They melted away in the light reaching down from above, and the sight of the utterly still water not far from him. But he reached down and seized Harry, and the grunt that Harry gave, his neck suddenly straining as he tried to bite down his reaction, was all the answer he needed in response.

He started to stroke, and almost ignored the way Harry fumbled past Draco's trousers until he found _him_. Then Harry draped himself across Draco, and they were racing each other, their fingers equally firm and equally slick. Harry must have conjured that, Draco thought, thoughts gasping and surfacing in his mind like dolphins racing through the ocean. _He _certainly hadn't.

Harry twisted his head to the side and bit down in the middle of Draco's chest, worrying the skin, then sinking his teeth and holding. Draco reached up to cup the middle of his scalp.

"Draco," Harry panted, and kept on saying it, a rising chorus that mingled with the lazy buzz of an insect somewhere in the hedges. "Draco, Draco, _Draco_..."

The moment lingered, like the sun. Draco opened his eyes when he could, when flashes of the light past Harry's head didn't blind him, and watched Harry smile at him and then lose the shape of his mouth in slackness, listened to the panting, felt the fingers digging into his hips. This was the best way to spend his time here in the secret garden, the best way to brand the memories into his mind.

He had to feel them that way, brand them that way. Otherwise, there was too great a chance that he would go back to the world with nothing, and perhaps someday would succeed in convincing himself that this wasn't real.

When it was the most real thing in his life, when nothing mattered next to it...

His mind scattered and blurred. There were fingers, and lips, and tongues, and teeth, and stroking, and _heat_, and he felt the shuddering aftershocks ripple through him more than he felt the moment of orgasm itself. He rolled to the side and let his head fall on the grass, cushioned and restrained by one of Harry's hands. He panted there, and the world slowly came back down around him, falling like flower petals into wholeness.

"That might be the best yet, I think," Harry said, and nestled against him, half on top of Draco and half curled along the side. "But you really _are _insatiable, you know. How many times have we gone at it already today?"

Draco touched his hair, feeling the way it curled around his fingers and then sprang back, and didn't answer. Because, for Harry, it really did seem to be one long day, impossibly long, broken by moments of their seeing each other, touching each other like lovers, rejoicing in each other's bodies, while for Draco, it was broken by the months or weeks of separation.

All one long day. Draco looked up at the clouds and then blinked away before he could stare too long into the sun.

Every time he visited, it got lower.

"Well," Harry said, and yawned, his mouth falling open and his hands arching back, "no reason that we can't go at it as many times as we have the strength for."

He fell asleep smiling, his head hanging off to the side the way it often did when he went to sleep on the bench, his hands curled into Draco's chest and half-discarded trousers. Draco lay there, steaming and content, trying to fill his eyes and his mind with light and color.

Trying. Trying to ignore the feeling of the summer night waiting for him, trying to ignore the remembrance of the five years that had passed for him since he first discovered the alcove and found Harry, lying there, reaching for him and speaking his name with familiarity, and never able to deny himself the lure since.

There was no explanation for it. There was no magic Draco had ever read or heard of that could account for this. There was no recognition in the real Potter's eyes the scant few times Draco had met him since the war, although the night Potter had returned his wand came immediately after the first time Draco had fucked him. Those green eyes were cold for him elsewhere, as the sun never was so bright, the water never so still, the heat never so gentle.

Draco had, finally, accepted it as that rarest of things, a wonder and a blessing, and tried to live with it since. This was the escape. This was the reality; when all around him soured and crisped and burned, still this was here, pure and stainless. Changeless. Timeless.

Except for the sun moving down the sky. Draco stared at it again and had to shut his eyes. What would happen when it set? Would they have the grace of a moon and stars, and then another day, or would the end of the day be the end of his gift?

He sighed and rolled slowly, gingerly, away from Harry, though he never had woken him up by leaving. If he stayed here, he would fall asleep, and as much as he would like to doze beside Harry, that would be wasting precious seconds.

He rose to his feet, and stooped down, letting his hand glance over Harry's cheek. Harry smiled in his sleep.

Draco turned away, found his shirt-he had left clothes here before and had found himself back at the Manor without them and no good explanation with him-and buttoned it neatly before he walked back through the gap in the hedges. He looked over his shoulder as he did so, to hold the last glimpses of Harry draped, softly breathing, across the grass.

The border where he crossed from light to darkness was palpable. He felt his stomach drop as if on a diving dragon, and suddenly he could see over the hedges to the rest of the familiar, benighted garden, with the setting sun vanished as though snatched beneath the earth.

Draco closed his eyes and spent a moment rearranging his hair. Time passed slowly in this world while he was with Harry in the other, and slowly in that world while he was here. It was the combination that was most favorable to him, and meant he could disappear for seconds only from either place, not disrupting anyone else's life.

It only made him wonder all the more what would happen when the sun set, what he had done to deserve this gift, what combination of magic and power and desire had shaped this for him.

It made him wonder what would happen if he walked through the gap in the hedges someday, and stayed there with Harry. Perhaps they could watch the sunset together, and face what came after it side by side.

He reached down, slipping his fingers beneath his shirt and along his hip, and yes, they were there. The marks of Harry's fingers, the slight scratches where his nails had dug in. The anchor of reality, or dream.

"Draco!"

It was his mother's voice. Draco opened his eyes. Time to go back in and play the dutiful son, who would marry the girl whom his parents wanted, who would do everything his parents wanted. He didn't know what else to be, and had no one beside him here who could help him gain the strength to transform.

But...

And it was the best and brightest of the thoughts he cherished as he walked back towards the Manor...

Perhaps, even if the gift turned out to be utterly temporary and there was nothing come sunset, he could keep the memories and use them to strengthen himself, as they strengthened him now. Perhaps he would always remember Harry's touch, the warmth of his skin, the brightness of his eyes, long after they had parted company in the enchanted garden.

It was a hope, and nothing else, that he would be strong enough, but Draco knew one thing, at least: though the marks from Harry's fingers would fade, the mark made in his memory, crushed down and beaten into shape like fine gold, never would.

He opened the door and stepped into a different kind of light.

**The End.**


End file.
